Nuke

Krümmel Accident Puts Question Mark over Germany's Nuclear Future

07/13/2009 12:00 AM

Atomic Nightmare

By SPIEGEL Staff

The recent accident at the Krümmel nuclear power plant in northern
Germany was more serious than was previously known. Anglea Merkel's
Christian Democrats are now finding themselves on the defensive with
their plans to extend the life of German nuclear reactors.

Ernst Michael Züfle should never sit down at a poker table, at least
not when real money is at stake. When asked last Thursday about damage
to the reactor of the Krümmel nuclear power plant, Züfle, the head of
the nuclear division of Swedish energy company Vattenfall, swallowed
audibly, nervously rolled his pen between his fingers and avoided
making eye contact.

It was already awkward enough for Vattenfall that the accident, which
resembled a similar breakdown two years ago, occurred after it had
spent ?300 million ($420 million) upgrading the plant. As in the 2007
incident, this time there was also a short circuit in a transformer.
The reactor, which had just been started up, quickly had to be shut
down again on Saturday, July 4.

Züfle was also forced to admit that the accident in the nuclear power
plant was more serious than previously known. In addition to the
transformer problem, he conceded, there was damage to "perhaps a few
fuel elements," namely the radioactive core of a nuclear power plant.
When asked how long the company had known about the problem, he
replied, somewhat helplessly: "Please bear with us, because we need
time to investigate the incident." He could have offered more of an
explanation.

What began as a minor technical glitch developed into a serious
problem within a few days, especially for Vattenfall, the operator of
the Krümmel plant. In addition to revealing a troubling degree of
carelessness and mismanagement, what happened in the Krümmel reactor
shows that the Swedish energy company has hardly improved its
communication strategy since the last accident. Once again, the
company has withheld important information and, once again, it has
been hesitant to come out with the truth.

Vattenfall has consistently stressed that all safety systems were
operational at Krümmel and that no radioactive leaks occurred. But
this makes the political fallout from the incident all the more
serious, putting Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democrats (CDU/
CSU) and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party on the defensive
with their plans to back nuclear power if they emerge victorious from
this fall's parliamentary election in Germany.

The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), on the other hand, who have so
far failed to come up with an inspiring issue for their campaign,
could hardly believe their good fortune. Environment Minister Sigmar
Gabriel, a member of the SPD, referred last Friday to the incident as
the "Krümmel monster" (a reference to Krümelmonster, the German name
for the "Sesame Street" character Cookie Monster), while at the same
time unveiling proposed legislation that would speed up the process of
taking Germany's oldest reactors, including Krümmel, out of
commission. "Of course, this is an election campaign," the minister
said candidly, "but we have to make it clear that the CDU/CSU and the
FDP are in bed with the nuclear power industry."

There has long been a lot more at stake than just the future of
Krümmel. The public discussion in Germany over nuclear power now
revolves around the necessary safety culture surrounding a high-risk
technology, the newly erupted debate over extending the lives of
reactors and the credibility of electric utilities and politicians in
an election year.

According to insiders, it is clear that not only Vattenfall, but also
the relevant supervisory authorities, did not provide adequate
information about what had happened at Krümmel. The Social Affairs
Ministry in Kiel, which is responsible for reactor safety in the state
of Schleswig-Holstein, where Krümmel is located, was apparently aware
of the Krümmel reactor's vulnerability to breakdowns much earlier than
was officially admitted.

The damage is considerable, and it extends to the entire nuclear
industry. Germany's major energy utilities see the Swedish operator's
sloppy management of Krümmel, which is now coming to light, as a major
fiasco.

DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: Incidents at the Krümmel nuclear reactor
On Tuesday of last week, Wulf Bernotat, the CEO of energy giant E.on,
which owns 50 percent of the damaged reactor, wrote in a sharply
worded letter to Vattenfall management in Sweden that his company was
"appalled" by the handling of safety procedures at the plant. The
reactor shutdown will cost E.on, as a co-owner, about ?20 million ($28
million) a month.

Industry insiders also believe that this time Vattenfall will not be
able to get away by sacrificing a few scapegoats, such as firing the
director of the power plant. The resignation of Vattenfall CEO Lars
Göran Josefsson can not be ruled out, and there is even talk in the
industry that the company could lose its license to operate nuclear
power plants. If that happened, E.on, as co-owner, would likely be
forced to step into the breach.

The top executives of nuclear power plant operators fear that they can
give up their dream of securing government approval for extending the
lives of their plants. The vehemence with which Jürgen Grossmann, the
head of the German utility giant RWE, insisted, in an interview with
the tabloid Bild, that all German nuclear power plants are safe shows
just how sensitive the issue is.

The German utility executives' fears that the safety problems at
Krümmel could be far worse than previously known are not unjustified.
An insider familiar with the work that was done on the Krümmel reactor
described to SPIEGEL the causes of the as-yet-unexplained damage to
the fuel elements. In his view, Vattenfall is "the discount chain
among the nuclear energy companies," and he is convinced that "the
elementary rules of our profession were broken there."

What Vattenfall nuclear division manager Züfle did not say last week
was that an internal crisis meeting was held at Vattenfall with
nuclear technology firms Westinghouse and Areva a few days before the
Kiel nuclear regulatory agency on June 19 cleared the reactor to be
started up again, after it had been shut down for two years following
the last accident. The subject of the meeting was foreign bodies in
the reactor.

Prior to the meeting, workers had discovered unusual objects
underneath the fuel elements, which are more than 4 meters (13 feet)
long. According to the insider, a "pale shimmer" was visible on photos
of the objects. An ordinary rod was apparently used to extract a few
large metal shavings from the reactor vessel. According to the
eyewitness, technicians could not determine whether there were more
metal shavings in the vessel. The shavings, which are several
centimeters long and very sharp, were apparently the result of work
that had been done on fittings and pipes in the power plant, and had
also entered pipes in the reactor area as a result of vibrations.

To protect the reactor from such foreign objects, in accordance with
internal cleaning procedures, pipe connections are normally required
to be flushed out after the completion of inspection work. According
to employees, however, this step was omitted because of "time
constraints." The reactor was apparently started up with the metal
waste lodged in some of its sensitive components.

Vattenfall spokesman Ivo Banek denies the allegation that rules were
not followed. "We had the various systems cleaned," he says. At the
same time, Vattenfall told SPIEGEL that "salvage equipment (e.g., a
short metal rod connected to a cable) was used to recover all
detectable metal shavings." On Friday evening, Vattenfall officials
still claimed that they had no knowledge about the size of the metal
pieces that had been retrieved.

In Hot Water

When foreign objects swirl through a reactor, which happens in
particular after an emergency shutdown, they can damage the fuel rod
casings, where the uranium is stored. The consequences can be serious,
because fuel elements that have been damaged or bent as a result of
age may compromise the "safe operation" of the plant during, for
example, another emergency shutdown -- of the kind that became
necessary following the recent transformer short-circuit.

If additional metal pieces are found during tests performed on the
reactor, which began on Friday when the reactor cover was opened, it
may be necessary to remove the entire core from the reactor vessel.
"Vattenfall can already order some castors for temporary storage,"
says someone involved in the investigation, in a reference to the
"castor" casks used for storage and transport of radioactive material.

According to a member of the German government's reactor safety
commission, smaller foreign objects have also been found occasionally
in other reactors, but larger foreign objects in the reactor pose a
"serious problem." The safety official says he is unaware of any
similar cases ever having occurred in German reactors. A realistic
estimate of the cost of cleaning a reactor, including shutdown costs,
would range into the triple-digit millions, says the official.

Many details surrounding the series of mishaps are still unknown.
Nevertheless, the Social Democrats are already demanding action be
taken. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the party's candidate for chancellor
in September elections, joined the chorus of those calling for a
permanent shutdown of Krümmel. But the SPD's schadenfreude could prove
to be premature. Gitta Trauernicht, the Schleswig-Holstein minister of
social affairs who is in charge of nuclear energy for the state, is
also in hot water over the affair -- and she belongs to the SPD.

Trauernicht sharply criticized Vattenfall's information policy,
despite the fact that she could have known about problems with the
trouble-prone transformer in the reactor. In December 2007, experts
from the northern branch of Germany's Technical Inspection Association
(TÜV), the Kiel ministry and both Siemens and Vattenfall performed
several so-called partial discharge tests on the transformer in
question. The tests, which are used to measure short-circuit risk,
indicated a value that was five times as high as the normal value.
This prompted the inspectors to note in their inspection report that
further tests were necessary "in relation to starting up the reactor."

But the outside experts took their testing equipment with them when
they left. After that, Vattenfall neglected to install its own
instruments. The procedure specified in the "Startup Notice" issued by
the nuclear regulators in Kiel on June 19 is relatively vague. In a
section titled "Determining the Usability of the Transformer," the
document reads: "Partial discharge tests are envisioned for machine
transformer AT02 during the course of resumption of normal operation."
But the instructions did not state that such tests were required or
prescribed, giving the impression that the tests could easily be
dispensed with.

It is clear that the ministry did not check to determine whether the
procedure arranged with Vattenfall was in fact performed. Such an
inspection was not justifiable under nuclear regulatory law, says a
spokesman for Trauernicht. But that is only half the truth, because
2007 accidents in the Brunsbüttel and Krümmel nuclear power plants led
experts, nuclear regulators and operators to approve an entire package
of measures to regulate continued operation. These measures also
included procedures with no justification in nuclear regulatory law.

The German Environment Ministry has long believed that legal
restraints under nuclear regulatory law should also apply to
transformers and generators. "Technologically speaking, there are many
interactions between the transformer and the safety of the plant,"
says Dieter Majer, a subdivision head in charge of nuclear safety at
the Environment Ministry. For this reason, he says, it was correct for
the problems with the transformer to be mentioned in the applicable
notice from the nuclear regulatory agency.

But the nuclear regulators at the ministry in Kiel relied on
Vattenfall, which had assured the officials that it planned to perform
the tests. "In light of everything we have experienced with Vattenfall
in the past, this sort of behavior is shockingly naïve," says a member
of the reactor safety commission.

Perhaps the motivations are much more straightforward than one would
think. Schleswig-Holstein earns at least ?35 million ($49 million) in
annual revenues just from surface water fees from three nuclear power
plants, Brunsbüttel, Brokdorf and Krümmel -- provided they are up and
running. For a state with a current budget deficit of ?600 million
($840 million), this is a lot of money. In other words, every day a
reactor is connected to the grid in Schleswig-Holstein is a good day.

DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: Decommissioning dates for Germany's nuclear reactors
The inconsistencies in the behavior of the Kiel inspectors are also
reflected in federal politics in Germany. The debate over the series
of problems at Krümmel and the safety of German nuclear power plants
reveals even more contradictions, particularly in the nuclear policies
of the CDU/CSU and the FDP.

According to the CDU/CSU's election platform, which Chancellor Merkel
presented to the public shortly before the weekend when the Krümmel
accident occurred, "nuclear power is, for the present, an
indispensible part of a balanced energy mix." Because solar and wind
energy are not yet fully available, the document reads, the CDU/CSU
supports "an extension of the operating lives of the safe German
plants." The FDP holds similar views. But now the Krümmel accident has
sparked a debate within the two pro-nuclear parties over what exactly
the resolutions mean. There have been vehement protests against
demands to allow nuclear power plants to continue operation for an
almost unlimited period of time.

Günther Oettinger, the governor of the southwestern state of Baden-
Wurttemberg and a member of the CDU, has proposed leaving nuclear
power plants connected to the grid for as long as safe operation is
possible. Even Krümmel is a "power plant with a future," he said last
week.

A look at the United States shows what this could mean. US nuclear
power plant operators are staunch advocates of "life beyond 60" for
their plants. Almost all are trying to get their operating licenses
extended to 60 years, and the US nuclear regulatory agency (NRC) is
already planning another round of negotiations for the period beyond
60 years. Deputy FDP Chairman Andreas Pinkwart even says that he
"cannot rule out the construction of brand-new nuclear power plants."

A New Lease of Life?

Resistance is starting to form against all this pro-nuclear activity.
The CDU state government in the western state of Saarland, which will
run for reelection in late August, even wants to speed up the pace of
shutting down Germany's oldest reactors. "It is very important that we
disconnect power plants like Krümmel as early as possible," says the
state's environment minister, Stefan Mörsdorf. "Their 'residual
electricity volumes' can then be transferred to other, more modern
reactors."

Under the 2002 German law regulating the decommissioning of nuclear
power plants, it is stipulated that for the nuclear power plants
currently in operation, the right for their further operation will
expire after the production of a certain amount of electricity, known
as the "'residual electricity volume," which is fixed individually for
each plant. The nuclear phaseout law was introduced by the SPD-Green
government under then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

At the same time Mörsdorf, a Christian Democratic, wants to leave the
question open as to whether the residual electricity volumes now
allowable by law can even be raised. According to Mörsdorf, "We won't
be able to talk about that until later, perhaps not even until after
the next legislative period." The question of whether the government
ought to "add another five years" to the lives of nuclear power plants
should not be answered, says Mörsdorf, until it becomes clearer how
quickly the development of renewable forms of energy will proceed and
how reliable natural gas shipments from Russia are.

Bavarian Environment Minister Markus Söder, a member of the Christian
Social Union, the sister party to Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic
Union, also says that unlimited reactor lifespans are "out of the
question," although he advocates extending lifespans "across the
board, for all safe reactors, by at least eight to 10 years compared
with the (SPD-Green) exit plan." After that, says Söder, Germans will
have to "see how renewable energy has developed."

Christian von Boetticher, the Christian Democratic environment
minister of Schleswig-Holstein, where the Krümmel reactor is located,
has a somewhat different argument: "We must make it clear that we will
not automatically extend the life of every nuclear power plant." The
CDU/CSU, says Boetticher, must "take a critical look at all nuclear
power plants in Germany." The FDP in Schleswig-Holstein, on the other
hand, is fundamentally opposed to extending plants' operating lives.
It favors the SPD-Green Party plans to phase out nuclear power
altogether and would not even allow Krümmel to be reconnected to the
grid.

There are also major differences over how Merkel plans to make
lifespan extension more appealing to the public. According to the CDU/
CSU election platform, the additional profits generated by the measure
would be used primarily to support energy research and lower
electricity prices.

No Solution

A lot of money is at stake. Nuclear power plants, most of which have
already been fully depreciated, are powerful moneymakers for their
operators. According to internal industry calculations, they produce
annual profits of ?7-8 billion ($9.8-11.2 billion), assuming
electricity prices are high. If their lifespans were extended by 10 or
15 years, total extra profits would amount to ?70-120 billion ($98-168
billion).

But who will monitor the "eco dividend" touted by Bavarian Environment
Minister Söder? Should Germany's four major electric utilities be
allowed to use the profits to solidify their power in the market, or
should the money be spent on non-profit projects? As with the issue of
plant lifespan, the CDU/CSU and the FDP lack a clear position on the
use of potential profits.

DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: Decommissioning dates for Germany's nuclear reactors
There is another problem lurking in the background that has citizens
worried: the unresolved question of disposal. For four years, the CDU/
CSU thwarted attempts by Environment Minister Gabriel to find, with
the help of scientists, a location where highly radioactive waste
could be stored safely. Southern Germany was also included in their
search for sites, which was met with resistance from conservative
politicians there.

Stephan Kohler, the head of the German Energy Agency, who is often
suspected by environmentalists of being on the side of big business,
sees the unresolved question of waste disposal as the key argument
against an extension of lifespans. "Just because we will have to find
a solution eventually doesn't mean we can merrily continue producing
radioactive waste," he says, noting that scientists have already spent
the last four decades searching for a way to safely dispose of the
waste. "It is not the fault of the German anti-nuclear movement that
we haven't found a solution yet," says Kohler.

The CDU/CSU and the FDP are pinning their hopes on a single site:
Gorleben, a name which has been synonymous in Germany with the
conflict over nuclear energy for more than 30 years. The exploratory
mine has already consumed ?1.5 billion ($2.1 billion) in costs, which
suggests that a fait accompli has already been achieved in Gorleben
under the pretense of research. Officials at the Environment Ministry
say that the exploration of the salt dome at Gorleben has already cost
considerably more money than would have been needed for an analysis
which did not have a predetermined result in mind. The facility in
Gorleben, say ministry officials, has been designed so its dimensions
are also sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the planned nuclear
waste storage site.

The way the CDU/CSU describes the final storage issue in its election
platform is fitting: "The CDU and CSU want an immediate lifting of the
moratorium on investigation of the Gorleben site, so that the interim
storage facilities at nuclear power plants can be closed as quickly as
possible." This sounds much more like a decision which has already
been made than a genuine investigation.

However, placing so much emphasis on Gorleben is dangerous, and
possibly very expensive, because a court could very well reject the
choice of the site, made as it was without clear criteria,
alternatives or previously defined safety standards. That could spell
the loss of billions in investments and decades of valuable time
expended on the search for alternatives.

Given the heated discussion over nuclear power, an incident that
occurred in Gorleben on the same Saturday as the Krümmel accident
seems emblematic. The short circuit in the Krümmel nuclear power plant
caused, ironically, a power outage in the site's exploration mine. In
the future, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection plans to
supply green power to the nuclear site.

PETRA BORNHÖFT, MARKUS DEGGERICH, FRANK DOHMEN, SEBASTIAN KNAUER,
GUNTHER LATSCH, CHRISTIAN SALEWSKI, CHRISTIAN SCHWÄGERL, SAMIHA SHAFY

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,635788,00.html
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